Outside of his time serving as the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been remarkably consistent in making movies. The 1970s had Hercules in New York, Stay Hungry, and The Villain (as well as a blink and you’ll miss it cameo in Robert Altman’s amazing The Long Goodbye), but it wasn’t until the ’80s that he became a star. Granted, the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron made him a star, but it was in the ’80s that he became a movie star, emphasis on the movie. Specifically, The Terminator, which showed off his physicality as well as his ability to command the screen, but throughout the rest of the decade he continuously proved that his work in James Cameron’s sci-fi actioner was no fluke.
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So, the question is, what were Schwarzenegger’s best movies of the decade? Which were his worst? Let’s find out.
10) Red Sonja
Supposedly, when his kids were growing up, Schwarzenegger would tell them that if they acted up, he would make them watch Red Sonja multiple times in a row. He also said it never came to that in terms of behavioral issues and let us just say, those kids really dodged a bullet.
Red Sonja amounts to a spin-off of Conan the Barbarian, but because of rights issues they couldn’t even call Conan, well, Conan. Instead, Schwarzenegger plays Lord Kalidor and, thankfully for the actor, he’s not even in half the movie. This is one cheesy, poorly acted slog, and it makes the next entry on our ranking look quite a bit better by comparison.
9) Conan the Destroyer
When a movie is a success the idea is typically to replicate said success. Conan the Destroyer went a whole different route with that. Gone is the R-rated nature of Conan the Barbarian and in its stead is a very silly PG movie with dialogue that ups the cheese factor so much you’ll vomit if lactose intolerant.
At this stage in his career, Schwarzenegger had yet to learn how to sell comedy. It falls flat whenever he’s asked to do so. If there is one performer who seems to understand what movie she’s in, it’s Grace Jones, who also elevated the unfairly trounced 007 movie A View to a Kill.
Stream Conan the Destroyer on AMC+.
8) Raw Deal
Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer are awful, but at least they’re memorably awful. You can watch Raw Deal at noon and forget it by 5pm.
It’s a very standard “Going undercover to dismantle the mob piece by piece” story. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better in Safe with Jason Statham, Nobody, The Equalizer, John Wick, The Accountant, The Untouchables, and the like. There aren’t even any memorable action sequences, which was essentially Raw Deal‘s one job.
Stream Raw Deal on Prime Video.
7) Red Heat
Red Heat amounted to Schwarzenegger’s first attempt at comedy, but it was only a partial effort. Many of the trademarks of his straightforward actioners are still present, and Schwarzenegger’s performance is mostly intentionally stoic.
At the end of the day, it’s just a rote buddy cop comedy. Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi have very little chemistry, and it’s never been much of a secret that the younger Belushi couldn’t carry a film as well as his older brother. To be fair to him, though, he is given a very obnoxious character to inhabit.
6) The Running Man
Like Edgar Wright’s remake, which Schwarzenegger himself praised, The Running Man is more focused on being fun than having anything real to say about society. That makes it a perfectly fine Saturday afternoon movie to have on while you’re putting the pot roast in the Crock-Pot, but nothing more.
This is a version of Gladiator that is wholly intentional in its lack of seriousness. It’s silly, somewhat fun, and has a few solid supporting performances, but there were better Stephen King adaptations in the ’80s. Then again, it was better than Firestarter and Maximum Overdrive.
Stream The Running Man on fuboTV.
5) Twins
Schwarzenegger’s final film of the ’80s was also his biggest departure from the macho man actioners of his past. And unlike Junior, his subsequent collaboration with Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman, it surprisingly works.
The reason Twins functions well is that it’s earnest in how it carries itself. One might think it would take the one-note premise of a tall man and a short man being twin brothers and hammer that into the ground, but it’s too focused on character to make that mistake. Even better, Schwarzenegger and DeVito clearly knew exactly how to play around with this story and with one another. Their chemistry is what sells the whole thing and it’s quite easy to see how they’ve remained friends in real life.
Stream Twins on AMC+.
4) Commando
Commando may be the most gleefully self-aware action movie to come out before The Expendables 2. From the moment we see Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix carrying half a tree down a mountain we’re well aware it knows exactly what it is and isn’t ashamed to just have fun as a “one man against a literal army” movie. Why is that one man going against that literal army? To rescue his daughter, of course. He’s Taken‘s Bryan Mills if Bryan Mills was seemingly immortal and shaved off the top of nameless soldiers’ heads with tossed sawblades.
Commando also benefits from (and this may be controversial) its charmingly dated soundtrack, the gleeful villainous performance by Vernon Wells, and its surplus of iconic one-liners. Seriously, even more than Predator and The Terminator, this thing has a ton of great one-liners. For instance, when he initially tells David Patrick Kelly’s Sully “You’re a funny guy, Sully, I like you, that’s why I’m gonna kill you last” only to later drop him off the side of a cliff with “Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last? I lied.” Other examples include “Do me a favor, don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired” and “Let off some steam, Bennett!” That’s just gold.
3) Conan the Barbarian
Even before The Terminator, Conan the Barbarian showed that Schwarzenegger had what it took to lead a movie. It just (at that stage, at least) had to be a role that emphasized his brawn over his acting chops.
Plenty of things work in Conan the Barbarian‘s favor, from the gritty look to world-building to the wackiness of its man-snake villain (plaid with great fervor by James Earl Jones). It skews a little too far into B-movie territory at times, but overall, it’s a movie that gets its job done and enjoys doing so.
Stream Conan the Barbarian on AMC+.
2) Predator
Now that Dan Trachtenberg has knocked the Predator IP out of the park three times in a row, it’s all the more possible Schwarzenegger will once more, after all these years, return to the role of Dutch Schaefer. It would be great, to, because it Schaefer was always one of Schwarzenegger’s best roles. He gets to spout one-liners, spread mud over his bare chest, fire an assault rifle, what more could one ask for?
But Schwarzenegger’s casting is just one aspect of Predator that allows it to function as well as it does. The pacing is rock-solid, Die Hard director John McTiernan always knew how to shoot the hell out of an action sequence, and the title creature is an iconically-designed masterwork of human creativity. Toss in a note-perfect supporting cast and Predator just clicks from front to back.
Stream Predator on Hulu.
1) The Terminator
While the premise of The Terminator is complex, its execution is charmingly simplistic. Two flesh-and-blood human beings, one of whom is from the future, go on the run from a cybernetic killing machine that can’t be stopped or reasoned with.
So many aspects of The Terminator just lined up. James Cameron’s mind was always wonderfully inventive, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton were perfectly cast, and its low budget gives it a gritty aesthetic, even when Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is right in the middle of a bumping (and very ’80s) nightclub. Furthermore, to an even greater extent than the subsequent, more powerful inventions of Skynet, the T-800 feels genuinely dangerous in this movie. A big part of that, of course, is how he guns down a woman right in the heart of sunlit suburbia in the first act. It’s a movie that starts off letting you know it has high stakes then never lets you forget it.
Stream The Terminator on fuboTV.
